Google Deleting Incognito Data & Social Media vs Teen Anxiety

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0:27Good morning for your daily show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, a new book about social media and kids has sparked a heated debate about social media and kids. Then, uh-oh, best to leave your browsing history because a new settlement revealed Google's incognito mode isn't as private as you might think. It's Tuesday, April 2nd. Let's ride.

0:54So we got the Iowa vs. LSU rematch last night, and boy did it live up to the hype. Caitlin Clark dropped 41 points and hit nine three-pointers to lead Iowa to the dub, sending Kim Mulkey and Angel Reese packing. You know, sometimes we blow certain players or games out of proportion, and it's impossible for them to live up to expectations. Caitlin Clark and Iowa somehow exceeded them once again. Yeah, it was a fantastic game. Definitely the most exciting thing to ever happen in Albany, New York. Sorry, Albany people. But it's true. I mean, Angel Reese also was super impressive. I haven't really seen her play.

1:28And also Caitlin Clark, I haven't watched that many games. Super back and forth games, super fast paced. Now let's look ahead to the final four. Both NC State and UConn have teams in the final four in both the women's and men's tournaments. So can you imagine being a student at those schools right now? There's something in the water, both at NC State and UConn right now. That's for sure. Now let's hear from our friends over at Robin Hood. Robin Hood is famous for being a commission fee trading platform. Other fees apply. But it's also got a lot more under the hood. That's its stock symbol, after all.

2:03And you can also research and invest in ETFs. And qualified traders can trade options. You an options guy, Toby? I'm more of a long-term thinker. That said, it's nice to know that the option to trade options is there. Yeah, I'm the same way. And what's nice is no matter how advanced of an investor you are, Robinhood's sleek design and intuitive experience make it easier than ever to start investing. If you want to see what's under the hood at Robinhood, learn more about the free app in the App Store or Google Play Store. Disclosers Investing Involves Risk, Robinhood Financial LLC, member SIPC.

2:37Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them, in fact. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Kids across the world are experiencing a mental health crisis and smartphones are to blame.

3:13That's the thesis of a new book by Jonathan Haidt called The Anxious Generation that's only been out one week but has already renewed a fierce debate about the relationship between social media apps and skyrocketing rates of depression and anxiety among teens. Hate is an NYU business professor whose ideas are really influential in Silicon Valley and beyond. His blockbuster book about campus cancel culture, The Coddling of the American Mind, was praised by Bill Gates and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. And he's been brought in by companies like Meta to give talks on social media and society. And his new book comes at a time when there's never been more scrutiny on social media companies to protect kids.

3:52In January, CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg were hauled into Congress for a tense hearing on social media's effects on teens. And Florida just passed a law that would ban kids under 16 from owning a social media account. Toby, the main thrust of Hayd's book is that smartphones are surely behind the youth mental health crisis. But critics aren't so sure you can say that with certainty and accuse him of stoking a moral panic around a new technology. Yeah, what's clear is both statistically and anecdotally is that the, quote, generational anxiety identified by hate is certainly real. What is not clear is exactly what is causing that generational anxiety.

4:30The big thing that you're hearing critics push back on is correlation is not causation. And that there are plenty of other factors that could explain the rise in anxiety in today's teens. Some of the multilayered complex issues that critics have pushed back on are access to guns, exposure to violence, the opioid academic economic hardship, increasing social isolation. So they're not just saying the fact that the rise of smart smartphones correlates with the rise of a teen mental health crisis doesn't necessarily mean that those two were caused by or one caused the other. Right. And hate is pushed back on that.

5:04He was ready for that criticism. He says, look, yeah, maybe those things are all bad for society, but you can draw a very clear line between Apple introducing the first smartphone in 2007 and a couple of years later, as mass adoption happened, that kids were were using smartphones and it led to this huge spike in anxiety and depression. He writes, Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternate universe that was exciting. And he's criticized these addictive features that social media apps have rolled out that have just kept kids glued to their smartphones, glued to their notifications that come from Instagram and TikTok.

5:46Some people are also saying, even if we can't prove a statistically viable link between the rise of smartphones, the rise of social media, and this generational mental health crisis, do we actually need definitive proof? Because common sense kind of certainly dictates that spending a lot of time with your face buried in your phone instead of playing outside is not how children are supposed to be living. So some people are saying, let's just get out in front of it now, even if we can't absolutely nail the data down. Let's just do what makes sense. kids going outside getting more sunlight exposure is definitely going to be better than being inside and stuck to your phone so what so we've identified a lot of problems here what are the solutions so hate in his book recommends a few measures that companies and parents and our you know our country can take right now that will help the situation one of those he says the most important thing is getting phones out of schools put them in lockers or special pouches during the day he also wants to keep smartphones out of kids before high school so they can have basic phones without access to the internet.

6:48And then finally, he agrees with Florida that kids should not have social media accounts before the age of 16. And he said that is sort of a bi - all of these three things are bipartisan ideas that every lawmaker can get behind and every company can get behind. Actually, not companies because they want to hook users. Earlier, I rescind my remarks. But those are some of the solutions that he puts forward. This is a debate we're going to have for the next months and years. Sometimes the truth hurts, and for Trump's True Social, numbers never lie. Yesterday, Truth's owner, Trump Media and Technology Group, disclosed some financials that were less than pretty.

7:23In 2023, True Social generated a whopping$4.1 million in revenue, which, believe it or not, was up from the$1.5 million it made in 2022. That translated to a more than$58 million loss last year, which calls into question if the business has enough going to remain solvent. Apparently, we need not worry, though, because the SPAC deal last week armed the company with$300 million in cash. Still, the public markets are finally starting to warm up to the fact that the stock that trades under the ticker DJT might be a little overvalued. It plunged 22 % yesterday, but still has a market cap of around$6.5 billion.

8:02Neil, should Trump be worried that the air is leaking out of his meme stock balloon? No, because it's still the most expensive stock you're ever going to see in your life. It's a$6 billion company that did$750 ,000 in quarterly revenue. I mean, this is just meme stock. This is even crazier than GameStop. This is maybe even crazier than Dogecoin or any of the other altcoins. I mean, the discrepancy between this business and its$6.5 billion value is absolutely wild. It has 494 ,000 monthly users, according to SimilarWeb. By comparison, X has 75 million. Threads has 10 times as many users as that.

8:44Reddit has 267 million users, which is exponentially more than TrueSocial, and they're valued at about the same time. So any traditional stock valuation you want to put on this thing, it is absurd. So Bloomberg's Matt Levine kind of said maybe that we shouldn't be trying to apply traditional stock market valuation to this stock because it's clearly divorced from those. There's no, Matt Levine kind of said, there's no law that dictates that a stock's price needs to be informed by its present value of future cash flows, as a lot of people use as an approximate, as to why a stock is trading at a price that it is.

9:22Stocks can trade on pretty much anything. He mentioned collective attention, online sentiment, the desire to outwit the crowd. It can be a political statement. And I think that's what we're seeing right now is that a lot of people just want to buy a token that represents kind of their fealty to Donald Trump. And so why are we getting too caught up in the financials when this is more akin to something like a Dogecoin, which is just, there's no inherent value behind it. Dogecoin doesn't have earnings, and yet it's got an over, it's had an over$7 billion market cap for years now. Right. I mean, also, there's another factor at play here.

9:56It's a bet on Trump retaking the White House. This guy owns 57 % of the company. And if he gets into the White House, I mean, he's the most powerful person in the world, he will probably do anything in his power to make this company do well. And so if you're betting on him taking the White House, he has a huge vested stake in this company. His entire fortune at this point is tied up in this company. He lost a billion dollars yesterday when the stock plunged 20%. So his paper fortune is going to fluctuate so much based on what this company is worth. You're also betting on him saying, I will do anything in my power to make this company's stock price go up.

10:32Yeah. And here's where things can get better for Trump media group. The election is coming up. He's got super PAC money to spend to sell ads on true social potentially. So that makes the financials maybe start to come in better next year. If he starts advertising for his own campaign on his own social media network. Again, this is where you don't want like political capitalism to kind of intersect in the way that they are in this one specific company right now. So is it right to do so? Probably not. But it certainly could happen. Yeah. And then one final note on Trump is that he secured the one hundred and seventy five million dollar bond that he had to put up for a civil fraud trial.

11:10So that's one sort of shadow that was cast over him is is is receding a little bit. OK, so here's a situation you might be familiar with. You fire up Google Chrome, open incognito mode and think you're free to. Well, whatever you want to do on the Internet, I'm not judging without being tracked by anyone. Eh, not quite. A class action lawsuit accused Google of collecting user data even when they were in incognito mode. And yesterday, the company said it would delete billions of data records that reflect the private browsing activities of users. The suit was filed in 2020, and the settlement was reached in December.

11:46But only yesterday did we learn how Google was going to respond. The plaintiff's lawyers call it a significant and rare concession from a tech giant. Remember, Google makes its living from leveraging user data to fuel its ad business, and now it has a lot less of it. For its part, Google said it was happy to delete, quote, old technical data that was never associated with an individual. But this whole ordeal is an important reminder that you're never truly wearing an invisibility cloak when on the Internet, not even when private browsing. Yeah, to me, this is a little like Tesla calling its autopilot full self-driving.

12:20Don't market something as something it is not. If you call it private browsing or incognito mode, don't oversell how private it is while still harvesting user data. And the settlement clearly shows that the courts kind of agree with that perspective. So one thing that is certainly going to change is that, or one thing that you saw throughout this suit is that employees were also raising concerns about incognito mode throughout the last couple of years. We need to stop calling it incognito mode and stop using a spy guy icon. That was one engineer wrote to a Google coworker in 2018. And then another Google employee recommended changing the incognito page to say you are not protected from Google.

13:01So clearly this was something that internally Google people realized was not right. And now it's they're making strides to change it. Yeah. Pretty embarrassing internal emails. Just for an overview, people might be wondering what is incognito mode? Like what is and also Safari has every every browser has it where you can go private browsing. It's not really private browsing, which we're about to explain. But basically what happens is your web browser automatically deletes the information of your search history or the websites you visited when you end the session. But the fact is that a lot of people can still find out where you went.

13:37Websites that you visited know that you went there. Your employer or school also knows about you. And your Internet service provider does know your search history as well as Google. And so now when you go on incognito mode, if you fire it up, you'll see that there is a splash page now sort of explains all these things as a result of this lawsuit. Right. And one thing that I have noticed recently over the last five or six years is the rise of private browsers from lesser known brands like DuckDuckGo, Brave. They've emerged as this privacy or a focus on privacy has returned for a lot of people browsing online.

14:14It's not just people default into using Chrome or Microsoft Edge or something like that. People are going an extra step to find browsers that their main value prop is that they do protect you. And it's almost like you're constantly browsing in private mode because they realize that a lot of these tech companies are overstepping their privacy boundaries. Up next, Gen Z loves the trades and what a long-term study of U.S. census data shows us about new types of jobs.

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15:42Gen Z is a lot of things, the TikTok generation, the anxious generation, but it's also turning into the tool belt generation, which is what I'm breaking down on this week's edition of Toby's Trends, where I, an overstimulated and sleep-deprived Gen Zer, educate my millennial co-host, Neil, on a recent trend I have my eye on. Today's trend is the rise in young people stepping off the beat in college to nine to five path and stepping into the trades. The number of students enrolled in vocational community colleges jumped 16 % last year and enrollment is currently sitting at its highest level since the National Clearinghouse began tracking data in 2018.

16:22The reasons are plentiful. America needs more skilled trade workers like plumbers and welders. Students are increasingly disillusioned by the prospect of going to an expensive four-year college and you can make bank in the trades. Neil, reading this Wall Street Journal article covering this growing trend of the so-called two-belt generation, one thing that really stood out, people are disenchanted with the old path and are down to try something new and get their hands dirty. Absolutely. I mean, this does seem like the free market in action. There's been a dire shortage of workers in the trades.

16:56That's led to higher pay. And people are looking at college tuition and saying, yeah, that's insane. Like, why don't I just go be an electrician and make six figures in a few years? And we're seeing that play out. Yeah. Carpenters and electricians are getting younger, which is showing that this trend really is something that is affecting Gen Z. The number of carpenters in the U.S. grew over the past decade while their median age fell from 42.2 to 40.9. Same thing for electricians as well. What also is interesting to me is that we've talked about this on the show before. There's this new study from the Burning Glass Institute that shows that roughly half of college graduates end up in jobs where bachelor degrees aren't needed.

17:37And many high school graduates say they're disinclined to take on that college debt. So that is something, the underemployment wave that you've heard us talk about on the show before, that is also leading people to step foot into the trades. Absolutely. There's push and pull factors here. One of the push factors is you look at college and you say, it's just not worth it for me. There's new figures out this year for some New England universities and colleges that showed that several of them now cost more than$90 ,000 a year when you add up tuition and cost. Yale, Tufts, BU, and Wellesley all cost over$90 ,000 a year.

18:10And so when you just look at that amount, that's way more than inflation has grown. So you just look at it and you're like, wow, I could really make a decent living in these particular trades. I don't have to go to a uber expensive four-year university. I'm already underemployed, As you mentioned, this seems like a very attractive opportunity. And I think COVID kind of changed people's perspective on the trades as well, because as other businesses shut down, more people started to realize that people still needed trade skilled trade workers. They were still reliable, well-paying jobs that weren't going away.

18:43So I think that also created this mindset shift in a lot of young people as well. All right, let's stay on the topic of jobs because there's a groundbreaking new paper out from MIT economist David Autor that reveals the profound impact of technology on the job market. By looking at historical census data, he found that six out of 10 jobs people are doing right now didn't exist in 1940. Software engineer wasn't a thing until a few decades ago. Solar panel technician, same. Podcast hosts, get out of here. The point is, most work is new work, thanks in large part to technological innovations and changing consumer preferences.

19:20Now for the inevitable. However, this new job paradigm has had some negative consequences, namely economic polarization. Over the last 40 years, Alter found, Americans have filtered into either highly paid professional work or lower wage service work, gutting the middle class. So what does the next 40 years hold? No one can say for sure, but one thing that's certain is most people working then will have jobs you can't even conceive of yet. One thing that definitely stood out to me about this paper is that while a lot of new jobs are created by technological advances, I mean, solar panels weren't a thing, so how could you be a solar panel technician?

19:57But not all jobs are created by new technology. Some come from just rising consumer demand. One of the big things that Alter mentioned was healthcare services jobs for an aging population. You've heard us talk about the silver wave, this aging generation. So a lot of new jobs are in the elder care world. And then during the first 40 years from 1940 to 1980, many new jobs were those middle class manufacturing jobs as the U.S. kind of became this post-war manufacturing powerhouse. But now in the last four decades, manufacturing has receded a little bit in the U.S. culture. Automation started eliminating some of that work.

20:33So now a lot of those new jobs are those high-end specialized professional work or those lower-paying service job sectors that you mentioned as well. All right. So let's talk about the big question. Overall, does technology replace more jobs than it creates? We have 80 years of data that Autor looked at, and we didn't really have this kind of granular numbers before. And he finds on net that, and particularly since 1980, technology, this is kind of depressing, has replaced more U.S. jobs than it has generated. And there's been more automation, what he calls, rather than augmentation, which is when technology generates new types of employment.

21:11That said, this guy has been historically very much a pessimist about technology, as you can see in a bunch of his previous papers. But let's look ahead to AI. He thinks that AI could be a force for good. We talked about the hauling out of the middle class since 1980. He thinks that AI, the particular type of generative AI technology, could restore some of that middle class heft because it makes some of those highly skilled professions doctors, lawyers. It allows it democratizes a little bit that anyone can sort of use an AI and do those tasks. Meanwhile, it helps lower skilled workers be more productive.

21:49So he's hopeful and it's not necessarily a thing that's going to happen, but he's hopeful that maybe AI will lead to a greater share of the middle class sharing in the economic gains as they haven't for the past 40 years. Right. Not a job killer, but maybe a complementary technology. So if you're listening to this on Spotify or Apple right now, you are no doubt aware that algorithms are at play governing what songs or podcasts grace your ears. musicians have long lived and died by these algorithms, but one man is determined to beat the algorithms at their own game through sheer determination. His name is Matt Farley, and the New York Times just did a big deep dive into his music catalog.

22:28And let me tell you, it is deep. He has written and recorded over 24 ,000 songs with subject matter so specific, sometimes it's uncanny. The impetus of this New York Times article was the fact that Farley had written a song that name dropped the reporter 11 years ago that included a lyric with Farley's phone number in it. The reporter called and realized that Farley hardly remembered him simply because he produces so many of these hyper-specific songs about fringe famous people and the off chances that someone searching the name might stumble across his music. But his catalog doesn't stop there.

23:03He has recorded songs about all 50 states and cities and towns within those states. and I haven't even mentioned his big money maker yet. His song's about all different types of poop and pee. All told, his catalog brings in$200 ,000 a year. So who are we to judge? Talk about a job that didn't exist in 1940. This guy has just gamed the Spotify and streaming music algorithms to make a decent living for himself. He makes nearly$200 ,000 a year, as you mentioned, and he quit his job in 2017 and he just pumps out albums and songs with very, very specific search terms. He also has 80 pseudonyms that he goes by, various bands that helps him game the algorithm as well.

23:45One of those is the Hungry Food Band. He sings about songs about foods. Guy who sings songs about cities and towns. He sang his albums about all 50 states. He has 600 songs inviting different named girls to the prom, 500 marriage proposals. He has an album of very specific apologies. And one of my favorites, It's the guy who sings your name over and over. The big question here is, is this good or bad art? Is this art as all? I am tempted to think that it is art because so few people out there actually create, fewer still actually create consistently. So is it spammy? Probably, but I think a lot of modern artists, even from like the Andy Warhols of the world, have been written off as spammy or kind of gaming the system in a way.